Clueless in Calcutta?

I seem to be speaking only to a group of three students via this blog - 9 people had enrolled for my course. I must commend Sunrita, Prayag and Doel for their responses and reading journals, and we shall have some solid discussions over lebu cha regarding what you've expressed. Do I have your permission to allow others in your course to read your comments/responses? However, before I proceed beyond introductory stuff, I want to know where the other six people in the course are. Is this online teaching idea not working, or do they not know about it, or do they not have easy access to the internet? If the answer is any of these, then I suggest we put the online teaching on hold, and wait till I get back to begin face-to-face classes, because six people out of nine seem to be totally in the dark about what is going on. Can someone in Cal tell me what's up with the others? Can you get in touch with them? It would be absurd for 3 people in the class to go far ahead of the others, and then wait for the others to tune in...What's going on?

This is the first background lecture. I have deliberately inserted terms that you may find unfamiliar or difficult. The purpose is to make you familiar with new terms, and I will be very happy if you ask me questions about them, or look them up.That is how learning happens, not by spoonfeeding.You might want to come back to this lecture again after you've made sense of some of the new words/ideas you're picking up. Remember, asking questions about things you don't understand in class is not a sign of ignorance, but of intelligence!

It has been difficult for the classical Western disciplines to accept the idea that values varied from culture to culture and were relative, that developed as a result of critiques of Enlightenment philosophy, most notably by French philosophers such as Michel Foucault. Foucault emphasizes that dominant discourses in society establish a normative code of values that leads to the suppression or ‘burial’ of the marginal or non-dominant discourses of communities and individuals who are not in a position of power. These become subjugated knowledges,that Foucault defines as a whole set of knowledges that are either hidden behind more dominant knowledges but can be revealed by critique or have been explicitly disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated.

Think, for example,of the special knowledges that indigenous communities possess about herbs and plants, or women's knowledges about healing foods or birthing, etc.Think of the difference between Western ways of writing 'factual' history and non-Western systems (devalued by the West) of history as 'myth' and storytelling.

Foucault’s description of the insurrection of subjugated knowledges as the immediate emergence of historical contents that have been buried and disguised highlights the role of the scholar, particularly the historian, in drawing out from the archives historical narratives that have been buried beneath dominant discursive formations. Foucault sees this re-emergence as emancipatory: this is clear from his notion that what emerges out of excavating these knowledges is a ‘genealogy’ that allows us ‘to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.’

An example of this kind of tactical usage is seen in Kancha Ilaiah's book, where he is tracing parallel genealogies of Brahminical and Dalitbahujan world-views. It is tactical usage, and he is not being anti-caste; rather, his work might be seen as reverse-casteist, where he inverts the values attached to the two world views, to denigrate Brahminical views and lionize Dalit ones. This strategy is similar to what the early Black writers of the Negritude movement did: in order to fight centuries of white discourses on the inferiority of Black peoples, they wrote literature that devalued White cultures and celebrated Black ones. This was rightly called anti-racist racism by Sartre. The similarity between Afro-American and Dalit strategies is something we shall have reason to come back to later in the course.

As a result of the critiques of Enlightenment thought by scholars such as Foucault, the 'evolutionary scale' concept that held that non-Western or non-literate or non-whatever people were not sufficiently evolved has been demolished, and replaced by the ‘reformist’ (from the dominant standpoint) concept of plural world views in which different cultures are seen to cognitively arrange experience and knowledge in ways quite different from persons of dominant-group heritage. However, the geopolitical reality in most countries which faced colonization, or among peoples who continue to confront internal colonization or opppression, is that the master narratives perpetuating the neo-Western ‘scientific’ world view continue to be firmly in place in the working of ideological and coercive apparatuses. Groups that wish to avoid being assimilated into these master narratives are often forced into a counter-discursive stance, as is the case with many Dalit and Aboriginal writers, which is ultimately a function of the power structures that encompass them. Often, even the rhetoric and conditions of struggle are predetermined by the power structures they contest. For example, historically, colonialism has demonstrated an ability to absorb and contain conflicting accounts, to the extent that many attempts at opposing master narratives, over time, come to represent the same hegemonic position they initially sought to oppose, or are co-opted, as it were into a liberal dominant-group agenda.

Take the use of the term 'subaltern' by Gramsci, for example.The idea of the subaltern, meaning of ‘inferior rank’, was adopted by Antonio Gramsci as a concept referring to groups in society subjected to the hegemony of the dominant ruling classes. More concretely, Gramsci first used the term as a euphemism or original covert usage for the proletariat in his “Notes on Italian History”, a six point project that appears in his Prison Notebooks (1973). He also claimed that the subaltern classes had just as complex a history as the dominant classes - something that was to inspire the Subaltern Studies project in India. However, this “unofficial” history was necessarily fragmented and episodic since even when they rebel, the subaltern are always subject to the activity of the ruling classes. In Gramsci’s theory, the term ‘subaltern’ linked up with the subordinated consciousness of non-elite groups that still had no clear conception of the state.

Another example: in many versions of modernism the function of the ‘margins’ that exist in relation to the ‘centre’ is seen as essentially, and often usefully, oppositional. The centre-margins binary requires the allocation of values to its components – the centre is seen as oppressive, decadent, while the margins represent a call for justice and the articulation of a certain kind of truth. Thus, the marginal serves the purpose of the larger discourse of modernism. Romantic versions of this type of modernism can lead to global narratives wherein the privileged scholar ‘takes up the cause’ of theorising on behalf of oppressed peoples, as it were.

More Ideas to Mull Over: Minor Literatures within Major Languages

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, for instance, develop a framework for reading literature that is produced by minority communities, but in a manner that does not apply or formulate theory in specific cultural and historical contexts.In their celebrated essay “What is a Minor Literature?” Deleuze and Guattari define a ‘minor literature’ as writing ‘which a minority constructs within a major language’. Its three salient features are ‘the deterritorialisation of language’, the relation of the individual to a ‘political immediacy’ and the ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’. The term ‘minor’ with its connotations of the subordinate makes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming minor’ along with its revolutionary potential and moral purpose attractive to many post-colonial scholars’ discussion of emerging lieratures in English produced by marginalized communities. Deleuze and Guattari are vague as to the application of their idea: ‘We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature’. However, their notion of linguistic deterritorialisation is a valid and relevant one. They ask, ‘How many people live today in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the language that they are forced to serve?’ A minority literature that is initially seen as an impoverished ‘product of damage’ can, by Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, become the harbinger of change and literary innovation, as in the case of Dalit literature. In fact postcolonial theorists have found this to be fertile ground for the interpretation of emergent writing by disempowered groups through an aesthetics of transgression or resistance. The globalising tendency within much of western theory, which develops emancipatory rhetoric that is often not linked to actual socio-political and culturally specific situations, can often lock minority groups perpetually into ‘victim’ positions without acknowledging or examining their agency in the complex historical process of the evolution of their collective identities and forms of self-expression.

As readers, we have to be careful not to do this either.

Although much Dalit and Aboriginal writing is the result of the double displacement or deterritorialisation (that is, urbanization or migration, and the loss of a territorializing native language) that is an important characteristic of a ‘minor literature’ , Deleuze and Guattari’s concept has little connection to the everyday reality out of which this writing stems. Their notion of a ‘minor literature’ is based on a Eurocentric and elitist understanding of James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, all canonical authors in European literature. In the case of Dalit Aboriginal writing, the notion of geographical, cultural, and personal dislocation or deterritorialisation as a space for creative resistance needs to be supplemented by a culture- specific understanding of the intersection of multiple traditions and realities. The Eurocentrism of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature makes it open to (ab)use as a tool to undertake stereotypical readings of new and emergent literatures based on the existing models of interpretation. As Native American scholar Louis Owens has observed, ‘The basic problem here seems to be that the center, even when it begins to define itself as something ambiguously called “multicultural,” still does not always hear more than the echo of its own voice or see very far beyond its own reflection.’ Moreover, D&G's claim that ‘there is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor’ , in other words only a deterritorialised, ex-centric literature can subvert the major and thereby innovate literature is problematic, given the fact that within minority communities there are many authors who work with ‘mainstream’ methods and language. The usage of colonialist language, aesthetics, and standards of literary achievement can be employed by 'subaltern' authors themselves.

Note: The picture at the top of the post is of a Native American healer performing healing rites at the former concentration camp site of Auschwitz.

Apologies!

I have not been able to access the internet as I have been in the process of shifting from one residence to another, and the place where I stay across the Thames at Southwark neither has wireless internet nor a cybercafe anywhere nearby. Give me Calcutta's overabundance of cheap cybercafes at every street corner any day! End result: I have not been able to post the lecture notes for this week as scheduled on Thursday and Friday. I will be posting a longish lecture on Saturday instead, when I will be working at the (mercifully, totally wired) British Library.

Back to the Basics

Week 1
Some issues to mull over and look up as you read the texts for week 1. The list is not meant to be prescriptive, simply a checklist to guide you through the basic concepts. Try to weave in some responses to these questions into your reading journals, but as I said, that is not compulsory.

1. What is the meaning of 'subaltern'? How did the term originate? What was the need for subaltern studies?
2. What is the difference between a 'minority' and a 'subaltern'? Who would be subaltern in the following categories - gender, sexuality, class, race? Can one be 'subaltern' in one category and 'elite' in another at the same time?
3. Does the fact that a university educated scholar like Sekhar-da or Dipesh-da is writing a publishable book/article about a subaltern community, using academic language, help in getting the story of that community across to a wider readership that would otherwise not have known the story? What are the issues you think are highlighted by this?
4. In colonial/postcolonial states, why is the writing of history such a contentious matter?
5. When writing the (his)tory of any community (including the 'imaginary community' of the nation) does it matter from whose perspective the story is being told? Why?
6. Can a 'majority' community be subaltern?
7. Do you think that if a person from 'within' a community writes the (his)tory of his/her community, it will be a more 'authentic' narrative than one by an 'outsider'?
8. When the subaltern is a person or community from the past, and can no longer speak, and has left no written records, can the voice of the subaltern be retrieved? How can literature help in this matter?
9. Think about the epics that you have read - Ramayana and Mahabharata. Are certain figures being deliberately rendered marginal? Are there certain dominant attitudes and values in these texts that exclude/marginalise some people on the grounds of gender/caste/race/class? What figures might you term 'subaltern' in these epics?
10. Assuming that you have grown up in Bengal, what has been your experience of prejudices held by people around you, eg. in matters of intercaste marriage, or the persistence of caste differences in various religious ceremonies, etc? Do you think that Bengal is a 'peaceful' place where caste tensions are non-existent compared to Maharashtra, UP, Tamil Nadu etc. and why/not? Do you think 'caste' has been overshadowed by 'class' as the arena of struggle in Bengal?

Readings and Assignments, July 5-23

We begin in a rather freewheeling fashion, with some theory, poetry and non-fiction.
Attendance was sparse on day 1, but we're just getting started with the semester, and I'm sure that everyone will be tuned in by Monday the 5th of July (BANDH?!).
Since I will be at King's College, London for the next 3 weeks, we're going to do distance education. Do note that the time difference between Kolkata and London is 5.5 hours, meaning you're 5.5 hours ahead of me.

I. Classes
Format: Each week, starting from Monday the 5th till Friday the 23rd, I will be posting the class lectures on this blog on Thursdays and Fridays. You get 1 attendance point by posting your detailed comments at the end of each blog post - in other words, responding to two lectures gets you two attendance points.

II. Home Assignments - Reading Journals
Format: On Saturdays, beginning from the 3rd of July, and then on the 10th and 17th of July, I will put up on the blog some questions that might help you to get thinking about the readings that you have been assigned for the coming week. Of course, they are simply to start you off, to get you thinking. Please maintain lively reading journals that record your responses, doubts, questions, etc. with regard to the readings assigned for the week, also record any related reading that you have done that week. You will email the reading journal at the end of that week to me, on Sunday the 11th, 18th and 25th of July. For your week-wise journal submissions on these dates, you get 2 attendance points for that particular week.

Your reading for the week of 5th July includes:
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography (essay)
Kancha Ilaiah, Why I am Not a Hindu (book)
Sekhar Bandopadhyay, The Namasudras Of Bengal (essay)
The readings for the week of 12th July include:
The poetry of Namdeo Dhasal (feel free to respond to poems that you particularly enjoyed)
S. Anand, Touchable Tales: Publishing and Reading Dalit Literature
Your reading for the week of 19th July is:
Sharan Kumar Limbale, Towards An Aesthetic Of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies And Considerations (translated by Alok Mukherjee)

The master copies of the texts for the next three weeks are with the three troopers who turned up for class on day 1 : Sunrita Chakravarti, Doel Bose and Oindrila Mondal.
Get cracking, then. Any questions or clarifications?